Did the entropy occur because of the fall?

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I’ve heard some people (Father Chad Ripperger for example) say that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) occurred after and because of The Fall. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know of any scientific evidence that supports this. What do you think?
 
johnz123 said:
I’ve heard some people (Father Chad Ripperger for example) say that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) occurred after and because of The Fall. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know of any scientific evidence that supports this. What do you think?
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I think that he should stick to his field of expertise, which most certainly is not thermodynamics. He might as well say the same thing about gravity
 
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We don’t have much revelation about what the laws of the universe were like before the Fall. However, there are some consequences of entropy, like the universe running out of free energy and becoming unable to support life, that correspond to an essentially limited duration of the present world.
 
Makes little sense to me. The preternatural gifts God bestowed on Adam and Eve before the fall, eg immortality, were supernatural n character. They were not due to us as part of our created nature. Hence, they required no general change in the laws of physics.
 
johnz123 said:
I’ve heard some people (Father Chad Ripperger for example) say that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) occurred after and because of The Fall. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know of any scientific evidence that supports this. What do you think?
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This is really an interesting question, but I don’t think that you will find scientific evidence for this. Science is not even aware of the Fall. So, how can it tell whether entropy occurred because of the fall? The fall of man from the state of original justice is a revealed truth. We did not learn it from the data of Science but from divine revelation.

Anyway, the question is interesting because the present state of the world is not what it should have been, if Adam and Eve did not commit a sin. We know from the epistles of St. Paul, for example, that death only came into this world because of our first parent’s sin (Rom 5:12). And it seems that all of nature has been disordered because of man’s sin. So, it is possible that some of the “laws” of physics that we know today were adjusted by the Author of Nature to accommodate man’s future life as a fallen being. (Again, there is no scientific evidence for this because we did not learn it from science but from divine revelation.)

However, God was merciful. He sent His Son to redeem us from sin. And we believe that at the last judgment, it is not only the elect who will be glorified, but even nature itself will be restored to its original glory. This is why Holy Scripture has many passages that speak of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isa 65:17; 2 Pet 3:13; Apoc or Rev 21:1).
 
Science can only rarely explain what it observes and measures. Entropy is but one aspect that is clearly observable, its effects being written of millennia before the concept was theorize in the modern age.
 
Whatever the theological ramifications, without thermodynamics, the universe would pretty much be unmoving and completely static. Entropy is pretty much a byproduct of the energy in any system becoming less useful. That being said, there’s a lot of energy in the universe, so it’s not like the “winding down” is a hurried process. It will be trillions of years before entropy causes everything to enter the lowest energy state (the “heat death” of the Universe), but we know little about the ultimate fate of the universe to determine whether the heat death or one of the other possible ends is most likely.

From a theological perspective, I suppose God could, whenever He wanted, just add more energy to the universe to prevent it from entering the lowest energy state.
 
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niceatheist said:
From a theological perspective, I suppose God could, whenever He wanted, just add more energy to the universe to prevent it from entering the lowest energy state.
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I think that is just what we believe.

" Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever."

God will sustain us by his Word, the one that came to us in the flesh. Christ our redeemer.
 
I think my biggest issue here is thinking of entropy as a “winding down”. Entropy is a key feature of how the universe works. It’s hard to envision how energy would every be useful if it always stayed in the same state.

As to God adding more energy, well, that may as be, but unfortunately for the physical universe as we understand it, if there’s a finite amount of energy, then eventually the cosmic bookkeeping comes into play. It’s hardly just theological thinkers that ran up against this problem and found it unpalatable. Einstein’s Cosmological Constant was inserted into General Relativity because one of the key features of GR is that the Universe has a starting point, has a finite amount of energy, and thus not only does it have a start, but it also has some sort of an end.

The Cosmological Constant added a constant amount of matter and/or energy being continuously added to the Universe to preserve the old Static Universe model (which had, in one form or another been the default view since Newton’s time). Einstein threw the Cosmological Constant into GR to get rid of the expansion that was inherent in General Relativity. When Hubble discovered the red shift of distant galaxies, this pretty much blew the Cosmological Constant out of the water, hence Einstein calling it the “greatest mistake of my career.” The Universe is indeed expanding, most certainly started in some sort of incredibly high energy state of incredible density and temperature, and through cosmological inflation and the expansion that followed (the Big Bang), came to be the largely homogeneous universe we see today. It would be a very dull universe otherwise.
 
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I don’t agree. I believe God made the laws of physics. They didn’t just begin away from him. A venerable theologian and exorcist has every right to comment

It makes perfect sense what Fr is saying. The Fall massively affected everything in the created world. There is even a passage from I think the readings from the Solemnity of the Annunciation that the angels’ half ruined world is now restored.
That is also part of creation as is everything is other than God himself.
Entropy is, tending to chaos, if I remember my lessons. It’s probably only the Mass which stops the universe falling wholly away into, eventually, nothingness
 
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johnz123 said:
I just found this article which has a decent explaination:

Answers in Genesis

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Began at the Fall​

After all, it is obvious that things would not “run down” in a perfect environment, right?
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I read the article. Actually, the author, Dr. Tommy Mitchell, was saying that we should not be using entropy as an argument, a sign or an indicator, that the Fall happened. The reason is because the tendency of a closed system towards disorder is not necessarily a bad thing in itself and may not be a consequence of the Fall. However, he did not say that it could not have been the result of the Fall either. So, entropy does not prove nor disprove the Fall.
neophyte said:
I strongly advise against using AIG as a source if you want to understand thermodynamics. They’re not competent in the field.
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I think it is ok to use AIG, not as a source of scientific data, but as a source of philosophical ideas. AIG explores the philosophical consequences of scientific data, but is not itself the source of those data.
 
Entropy is not a tendency to “chaos”. Quite the opposite, in fact. A universe at a very low entropy state is in fact very ordered; essentially little more than a fog of elementary particles and energy at its lowest state. Hard to imagine a less chaotic system than a system at its lowest energy state; very few if any interactions save the basic background of Planck scale activity. A low entropy universe, like the universe at the moment of inflation, is a LOT more chaotic, with the fundamental interactions coming into existence through symmetry breaking.

Both an extremely high entropy universe and an extremely low entropy universe are both pretty dull; the latter having an enormous amount of potential, but densities and temperatures so high that the fundamental interactions were united, and the whole universe was a super-heated plasma, the latter being a super-diffuse plasma where the fundamental interactions barely work at all, where gravity is practically impotent and even the other interactions happen at such a low level that they don’t do much either.
 
rom said:
I think it is ok to use AIG, not as a source of scientific data, but as a source of philosophical ideas. AIG explores the philosophical consequences of scientific data, but is not itself the source of those data.
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To my issue with usong AIG in this context is that they have repeatedly shown themselves to be totally incompetent w.r.t. the Second Law. They haven’t the slightest clue about what it is, or what it means.

They did, however, get it right when they said that the Law cannot support the idea posed in the OP. Even broken.clocks…
 
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I have a vision of this answer and Fr Chad’s answer being considered at the gates of Heaven

Now , then, let’s see
 
neophyte said:
To my issue with usong AIG in this context is that they have repeatedly shown themselves to be totally incompetent w.r.t. the Second Law. They haven’t the slightest clue about what it is, or what it means.
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I can neither agree nor disagree with you because I don’t know what you read from AIG that made you pass that judgment. Anyway, there are many contributors to that site, too. So, it is possible that one author misunderstood the Second Law, but that might not represent everyone in the site.
 
Everything that is not God, by its very nature, is subject to corruption, decay, and disorder (if it weren’t, it would be God), so I’m not sure if entropy is a result of the Fall or the simple fact that creation is not God.

There is required a special participation in God’s nature to avoid this, as began with the Incarnation and will come to completion at that time when “God may be all in all.”
 
rom said:
I can neither agree nor disagree with you because I don’t know what you read from AIG that made you pass that judgment.
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Over the years I’ve read many, many things at AIG about the Second Law. The only thing they get right is when they say something like “heat flows from hot objects to cold objects”, and the deeper they go from there the more wrong they get.

I realize that my answers have been brief. I’ve been at work today, this is not a question that can be answered in a short time. If you like, I can try to expand on my answer later.
 
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